BLOOMBERG — A South Carolina grand jury’s indictment last week of a white police chief in the killing of an unarmed black man capped three years during which a tense patience united Eutawville’s 300 residents.
“It seemed for a while that the whole thing was being swept under the rug,” said Thomas Wolpert, the white owner of an outdoor-goods store in the one-block downtown, steps from where Bernard Bailey died in front of town hall. “You had the tinder. You had the match. But nobody struck it.”
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The murder indictment of Richard Combs offers a counternarrative to those unfolding in Missouri and New York, where grand juries refused to charge police for killing unarmed black men, triggering protests across America. The charges speak to more intimate ties between blacks and whites in small towns and challenge the idea that racial conflict is at its worst in the once-segregated South.
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